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| Image from Goodreads.com |
This quote from our Writing in the Digital Age reading really got me thinking yesterday evening. Why is it that we place so much emphasis on the looks of things in order to evaluate their authenticity? This is true of all people, and not just with technology and writing, but with almost everything in our lives.
We're a prejudiced species, which is neither good nor bad. We have the gift of self-awareness, so of course we're going to have biases that are connected to our thoughts and that will affect our perceptions of the world. These biases come from everywhere -- our upbringing, commercial media, our daily interactions, our past experiences -- and impact every aspect of our lives.
What I'm fascinated with is the impact of our bias on the way we visually perceive things. Things that don't really matter. I can understand biases on physical things. For example, someone who doesn't like big dogs and is afraid of them even before seeing if the dog is nice has a pretty justified reason -- big dogs could potentially hurt you. Even people who judge other people usually have some kind of logic (we won't get into the sense of that right now). But the look of technology? Pure aesthetics? Why does it matter?
When I say it like that, of course it seems silly. If you're anything like me, you're probably saying to yourself "well, it doesn't really matter, as long as functionality isn't an issue." But that's not true. We really do prefer certain aesthetics over others, even when functionality is comparable.
For example, on my Kindle Fire (which I love, and no, Amazon doesn't pay me to say that) some books get distorted because the publisher/self-publisher/whatever didn't do a great job formatting the text for e-book. That shouldn't reflect on my perception of the text, but it does, because I'm used to neat, orderly books. Forget the fact that I'm aware why the formatting problems happen and that my logical brain knows it makes no difference to the words themselves, my bias makes me want to put the book down or dismiss anything it says as untrustworthy.
What are your thoughts on aesthetics in writing and technology? What are some of your biases? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments!
From a logical perspective, the Desktop folder is no different from any folder on a filesystem. Folders are primarily used to hold and (hopefully) organize similar files. I will immediately view someone with a lot of files and folders Desktop as unorganized, even if they have an organization scheme that makes sense to them.
ReplyDeleteAlthough to be fair, most users don't have any sense of organization at all.
Like we were talking about the other day, I'm more inclined to think that writing which has been published is better than those that aren't published (and by published, I mean they're signed on with someone and making some form of monetary gain through the writing). This is a really absurd way to consider writing as "good" or "bad" though, simply because I know tons of people who are really exceptional writers and I love their writing, yet they're not getting paid for it. So. This is somewhat of a stretch, but aesthetically I'm more inclined to read something from literal pages in a paper book and to consider them well written than I am to feel that anything online or through e-book publication has credibility. It's that idea of what is "real" and what is "posing as real." I do feel like a snob, but it's the truth -- it will take a long time for me to be open to reading self-published works.
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